The Promise Received by Faith

One of the coldest days recorded in modern history was in 1983.

I found out recently.

In uh the northern part of Antarctica over Russia in July of 1983, the temperature was negative 128 degrees.

Wow, you can imagine the uh weather forecast that day.

And now in the news, uh our warm weather is gonna be giving way to a cold front coming through.

It's been negative 80 and it's gonna be negative 120, so bundle up and be safe out there.

I don't even know how you survive in that.

I'm not even sure what you wear for that kind of weather.

I can imagine you have to have some kind of really thick, you know, wool or mint coat or something, just like four inches thick and no exposed skin whatsoever, electric socks, electric ski mask.

And I'm sure you'd agree that unless you actually put all those articles of clothing on, they would profit you nothing.

We know intuitive from the time we're little kids, unless you actually put that jacket on like mom tells you to, you're gonna get cold.

John Calvin famously began his Institutes of the Christian religion with a similar observation regarding us and the benefits of Christ.

John Calvin said this: So long as Christ is separated from us, we have no benefit from him.

We must be engrafted in him like branches in the vine, the Holy Spirit being the bond of union between us and Christ.

By faith, he said, we embrace Christ for his gratuitous righteousness, which he imputes to us.

The idea is that the redemption that Jesus Christ accomplished on our behalf must then be applied to us for us to be profited anything.

We're continuing this morning in our trek through Romans, Romans chapter 4, verses 13 through 25 is our text, as was just read.

Romans 4:13–25

And we're considering this question, in fact.

How exactly is the righteousness of Jesus Christ, the saving benefits of Jesus Christ that he accomplished on our behalf through grace, how are they appropriated to us?

How is that which Christ accomplished for us applied to us?

How is it received?

How is it put on, so to speak?

Or we might say it this way, on what condition does God impute the full obedience and righteousness of his son to us?

And the resounding and somewhat mysterious answer of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation is that God imputes the righteousness of Christ.

He applies the saving benefits of Christ to us by grace through faith.

Romans 4, verses 13 to 25 is a continuation of Paul's ideas from that we heard last Sunday from Pastor Justin as he argued that salvation is not by works, but rather by faith.

Romans 4:13–25

Abraham is serving as our illustration from the pen of the Apostle Paul, because Abraham beautifully illustrates the fact that long before Abraham really became super religious, long before he was circumcised, long before he did many things, he was counted righteous by the faith that he had in God when God promised him a son, even though he was an old man.

By way of a little bit of recap, you may remember that the Apostle Paul in the first three chapters of Romans has like it, like a prosecuting attorney in the courtroom.

Everyone's sitting on the edge of their seats, and Paul, argument after argument, is convincing the jury of the guilt of all of humanity.

He talks in chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapter 3, going from the pagans to the most religious of us all, showing that by nature, apart from Christ, we are altogether become unprofitable.

He mentions that God looked down through the corridors of time.

And instead of God seeing some people who would choose him, some people that would say yes to God, some people who would live more morally than others.

Scripture tells us when God looked down through the corridors of time, he saw there was not even one person righteous.

No, not one.

There was not a single person who naturally sought after God.

There was no fear of God before the eyes of those who by nature were dead in trespasses and sins.

In his verdict in chapter 3, verse 19 is that all humanity is on a collision course with destiny to stand before God on judgment day, for their heads to be hung low, for their faces to be flushed with shame, for every mouth to be silenced, and our bloodstreaked hands to be empty of anything we can offer our righteous judge in exchange for mercy.

But it's precisely this very low point of the bad news of Scripture, the bad news of the gospel that he gives us the good news.

That God has intervened, that he is interposed, that he is placed between us and our God, our creator, his Son Jesus Christ, to absorb all of God's due and just wrath against us, and also to create our own righteousness by which we stand before God just, the righteousness of Jesus.

So we could say, in summary, of everything Paul said so far, that not only did Jesus stand in our place condemned, clothed in our sins, but by faith we can stand justified, as it were, in his place, clothed in his righteousness.

Our passage breaks down into four main movements this morning.

In verses 13 through 15, Paul gives an argument that is a sort of a negative argument, rejecting the idea of justification by works.

He follows that up in verses 16 through 17 with a second argument, affirming the beauty and the sufficiency of justification that is by faith in Christ's performance and not our own.

Verses 18 through 22, he gives us a beautiful portrait of Abraham's faith to kind of answer the question: well, what does justifying faith actually look like?

And then closes out in verses 23-25, calling us to faith in God who raises the dead.

It's of note also as we read this passage that the word promise is mentioned some five times.

It is sort of the unifying thread that weaves through this passage, the promise of God to Abraham.

It is what was believed unto righteousness in Abraham's case, and it is what we believe unto righteousness as well.

The promise that came to Abraham specifically was the promise of a son.

But not only was it the promise of a son, it was further the promise that through that son, Abraham will become the father, the patriarch of many nations, which is a big deal because you can have a child and not necessarily be the father of many nations and the patriarch like Abraham is.

And then thirdly, not only was he going to have a son in his old age, not only would he be the patriarch of many nations, but that through his descendant, all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

As we think about the term blessing as it comes into the context that we've seen so far in Genesis, we start in Genesis chapter 1, everything's wonderful and good, and God created a good earth.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

By chapter three, it falls under the curse of sin and condemnation.

God cursed the ground, he cursed humanity.

We are under the curse of the law.

And so when this promise comes of a blessing to all nations, this is not just God making up stuff on the fly.

This is, it signals a transition in the way that God is going to relate to humans.

There's going to be a blessing to come to the heirs of promise.

And if the curse was the curse of condemnation, the blessing is going to be the promise of righteousness.

That is what Abraham believed unto salvation.

He believed in the fact that one day one of his descendants would bring about the decisive blessing to deliver us from the curse of condemnation.

Blessing would come not only to his lineage, but through his lineage.

And of course, we know this side of history that he was talking, God was talking about his son Jesus Christ, who would come in the lineage of Abraham, and through him all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

Abraham's faith wasn't merely a faith that you're going to have a son.

Okay, God promised me something neat something good.

I want a son, he's going to give me a son, and I believe him.

It's very salvific, it's very focused on redemption because even Jesus said in John chapter 8 and verse 56, Abraham looked forward to my day.

John 8 · chapter mention

He saw it and rejoiced in it.

So Abraham's faith was not absent of faith in Messiah, it actually was faith in this descendant who would bless all the nations.

So the backbone of our text this morning is this promise that God made to Abraham, a promise of righteousness that in believing, that righteousness is then imputed to us.

It's our main idea.

Paul's going to give us two arguments for this.

The first argument is basically that the promise of righteousness that God made to Abraham could not have been received by him based on his performance.

In other words, God didn't condition him receiving the benefits of that promise on his performance.

Why?

Well, because verse 15 tells us, because the law brings wrath, not righteousness.

The law brings wrath, not righteousness.

Imperfect obedience to God's perfect law can do you no good on judgment day.

If I were to make you uh make you a wager and say, you know what, I'm gonna give you a thousand dollars, everyone's ears perk up, okay, what's the condition?

If you run a sub-two-hour marathon, that's all I ask.

I think someone from Nike may have just done that recently.

After many years of trying, we just broke the two-hour mark.

But you and I probably aren't gonna do that, right?

So no matter what I promise, no matter how glorious and how beautiful and how magnanimous the promise is, if it's conditioned on something you can't even possibly meet.

I couldn't run a four-hour marathon right now, right?

If I were on a bike, I might get under two hours.

But the fact is the promise, as he says in our verses here, becomes void if it's based on a condition we can't meet.

So we see this in verse 13.

And the promise to Abraham and to his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.

For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be heirs, faith is null, and the promise is void.

Why?

For the law brings wrath.

But where there is no law, there is no transgression.

So God set up salvation in such a way that it circumvents our performance, because we can never perform well enough, and it depends on Christ's performance for us.

So the first argument is justification must be by faith in order to exclude our obedience and be conditioned upon Christ's.

Second argument.

He says, faith guards grace, guarantees God's promise, and grants salvation.

It's a three-pronged, this is one of my favorite verses in the Bible.

It's a three-pronged affirmation of faith, setting faith forward as the ideal condition for us inheriting God's promises.

Here's what verse 16 says.

This is why it depends on faith.

In order that the promise may, number one, rest on grace, number two, and be guaranteed, and here's the third word, to all of his offspring.

So first, faith guards God's grace.

It's only a promise.

The promise can only depend on grace if it depends on faith.

And here's why.

Because faith is fundamentally not working, but resting.

This is a huge concept.

That's why earlier in chapter four, you see him contrasting faith and works.

We often think about faith as something that's kind of hard to do, right?

You have to try to believe, you have to force yourself, you have to try to stir yourself up in faith.

Because faith is an activity of the soul, but it's not a work, properly spoken of, because it's resting and receiving what God has done for us.

Work is something that earns.

That's why we get out of bed and we go to work and we we um expect at the end of two weeks to get paid for what we've um produced.

So earning, works earn.

And if you earn something, then that means you're owed something.

And if you're owed something, that means if they don't pay you, you can show up to your boss and say, hey, we have a contract here, and I'm gonna sue you for not paying me what you owe me.

I clocked in, I did the work, you didn't pay me.

When you apply that kind of idea to God, think about what you have there.

Standing in God's presence, demanding him give you something based on your performance.

That's what's called boasting.

And God has so arranged it, and actually, because of the fall, it just wouldn't work anyways, that no one will ever boast in God's presence.

When we look through the pages of scripture, we find numerous examples of how things didn't go very well for people who stood in God's presence based on their own merit and performance.

You remember when Uzza, um, Uzzah very um haphazardly reached out his hand to stay to study the Ark of the Covenant that was being carried by some oxen.

What did God do to Uzzah when he touched the Ark of the Covenant?

He struck him dead.

Remember when Nadab and Nabihu, the priests, offered to God not fire that had been taken out of the tabernacle, but something they'd kind of struck some flint together and made their own fire.

It was called strange fire.

When they offered it to God, God consumed them with the fire.

You have whenever Herod in Acts chapter 12, whenever he's given a speech, and all the crowds are like, Wow, it's not the voice of a man, it's the voice of a God.

Acts 12 · chapter mention

And it says they they called him a God, and he, swollen with pride, was promptly eaten by worms, struck down before them all.

Or Nebuchadnezzar, who stood on one of his balconies, said, Look at the kingdom, look at all that my hands have created.

And he was struck mad for seven years and ate grass like an ox.

Faith is an activity of the soul, but fundamentally it's not working, it's resting and receiving.

This is actually how the Westminster Confession of Faith describes faith.

It is receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness.

That's why it's not a work, because it's receiving of God's fullness.

That's why it protects grace, because it's the only way you can receive grace freely.

It's by receiving it, not earning it.

Secondly, justification by faith guarantees the fulfillment of the promise.

The second part of this argument he's making here.

It depends on faith in order that the promise may be guaranteed.

Isn't that an amazing word?

We all love a guarantee, right?

We love Amazon's money-back guarantee if you send it back within 90 days or whatever.

Jesus' guarantee is even better than Amazon's because Jesus doesn't just guarantee that if you don't like the product, you can send it back for free.

Jesus guarantees you're going to love the product, and he guarantees you're going to receive the product and you're going to receive it on time.

The guarantee is that when you stand before God one day, clothed in Christ's righteousness, as Scripture says, if you put your hope in Christ, you will not be put to shame.

If, however, God's treatment of you on judgment day is and even on a daily basis, if it's predicated on your performance, the only guarantee is wrath, right?

The only guarantee is that you're not going to pass the bar of God's justice.

This is one reason why my heart breaks for our Muslim neighbors who, in their theology, they they adhere, they spend their entire lives adhering every day to all these rituals, the five pillars of Islam.

But at the end of time, they will tell you that when they stand before Allah, he's going to judge them, and it's really going to be up to him in the moment whether he gives them mercy or not.

Because they know they've fallen short of his standard, and it's just going to be in his mysterious will whether or not he lets them into paradise.

There's no guarantee when you have works-based righteousness.

Thirdly, Paul says, and amazingly, justification by faith opens salvation to all without distinction.

In other words, he points out here that the promise given to Abraham was not that he would be the father of a nation, Israel, and that all those who became a part of that nation, Israel, would then be saved.

But rather he'd be the father of many nations, and that Messiah, his descendant, would bless many nations.

That can only happen by faith.

There were many in Paul's day who had the mindset that if you were to be saved, you had to become a functional Jew.

You had to become a proselyte.

You had to abide by their dietary laws in accordance with the Mosaic law and covenant, the ceremonial laws.

You had to be circumcised, you had to attend synagogue, all these things, you had to become a Jew.

And Paul shows from the Old Testament that they were mistaken.

You see, the idea was many Israelites correctly understood that God had chosen Israel to be a special nation.

But they forgot and they overlooked the fact that that was only for a period of time to bring and to usher in Messiah, then to bless all nations through faith.

And so we have in Galatians chapter 3, verses 26, the Apostle Paul says, In Christ Jesus, you all are sons of God through faith.

Galatians 3:26

Whether you're Jew, whether you're Gentile, whether you're male, whether you're female, whether you're bond, whether you're free, whether you're rich or whether you're poor, faith is the way in which we receive Christ's righteousness.

Not our birthright, not where we're, not what continent we live on, but those who believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ through faith.

Okay, so the arguments are done.

Faith wins, works loses.

But how does this relate to us today?

Judaism in Paul's day erred in two major ways.

And one of them, I think, we think about most of the time, the idea of legalism.

In Paul's day, there were those, and honestly, it may not have been all, it may not have been a bunch of them, just a certain group of those who were so religious that they felt like their faithfulness to God was the grounds for their acceptance.

We see this in Jesus' ministry whenever a rich young ruler comes to Jesus one day.

And the rich young ruler asks Jesus, he says, Good teacher, what must I do in order to inherit eternal life?

I mean, he knew the scriptures, right?

He heard the promise.

He knew it was the promise of righteousness, he knew it was the promise of eternal life, but he comes to Jesus asking what he must do to inherit that eternal life.

And Jesus very wisely says, Well, what are the commandments?

Because he knew he was trusting his own works.

What are the commandments?

And so this guy lists a couple of the commandments, and Jesus says, Well, keep them.

And he says, Well, I've kept those from my youth up.

I've got a squeaky, clean record.

That was his own mentality.

That's legalism, thinking that you've been good enough for God.

And Jesus says, Well, just before you get one last little thing, just a little thing, not much.

You lack one thing.

And of course, his ears perked up.

He says, Um, you're rich, you're young, you're a ruler, a man of influence, a man of great possessions, you've got the whole, your whole life ahead of you to enjoy your possessions.

I'll tell you what, sell everything that you have, give it to the poor, and then you'll have treasure in heaven.

Then you'll have uh a guaranteed inheritance in heaven.

And what was his response?

He turned on his heels and walked away from Jesus sorrowfully.

You see, because he was trusting in his works, and Jesus always is gonna give us one thing.

If you're trusting in your works, there's always gonna be at least one thing you lack.

Legalism will never get you to glory.

But there was also another mistake that the Jews in Paul's day, and this may have been the predominant view, actually.

It was a we might call it Jewish exceptionalism.

Uh, theologians call it covenantal gnomism.

We're gonna go with Jewish exceptionalism.

So the fact is they believed correctly that God had chosen Israel to be a special people, but they believed that salvation came from them abiding in that covenant.

So all you had to do is become a Jew, all you had to do is live good enough to stay in covenant with God in relation to this covenant of Moses.

You know, be circumcised, don't eat the wrong foods if you do, confess it, maybe make some sacrifices.

Just stay in covenant with God in that covenant of works, and you'll be saved.

It was a form of exceptionalism that they misunderstood, thinking that they were in and everyone else was out.

And I mentioned this especially this morning because I think today that is a huge form of self-righteousness that we ourselves can be tempted to give ourselves over to.

It is part of our story as well.

We create for ourselves various forms of exceptionalism so we can feel better about ourselves and feel like things are going to be better for us on judgment day, should there be one.

Our story.

We approach God by performance, not faith.

On one hand, we may be foolish enough to think that we've performed perfectly enough to earn it, legalism, or we're just better than average.

And of course, if God loves the world, then uh he's not gonna send half a people to hell.

So as long as we're above average, we're a shoe-in, right?

And so when we walk in our own wisdom instead of in faith, we carve out for ourselves various forms of exceptionalism.

This is actually, I think, what we see in this cancel culture, right?

It's a form of self righteousness where I'm gonna go back to your Twitter feed 10 years and I'm gonna find something that doesn't measure up to our social norms today, and I'm gonna ruin your life.

Well, who could stand if we all stood before God's judgment seat?

The psalmist said if God should mark iniquity, who could stand?

So it's self righteousness to think that I am above that.

I've never seen Said anything wrong, and I'm going to dig through your past and try to find something and ruin you and cancel you.

It's a form of exceptionalism if you are on the right side of history.

Maybe the exceptionalism of achievement.

Some of us may take a little bit of pride, or maybe a lot of pride, in our work ethic, in our hard work and what it has achieved for us, in our education, in our career, maybe in our conservatism.

And we're among those conservatives that look down on the liberals, or maybe you're among the liberals who look down upon those foolish conservatives.

We all like to be a part of certain groups and then to feel sort of exclusive.

And in that exclusivity, in that exceptionalism, we feel ourselves to be that much more commendable to God.

Even if we don't even think about it in those terms, we feel that need for being exceptional and better than the rest.

Sometimes it's not our achievements, but even the things we've suffered.

There are some who have suffered so much in their lives that have gone through traumatic and difficult experiences.

Maybe most of your life this morning, if you look back, if you compare it to people around you, you've had a very difficult life from your childhood.

Maybe you had some traumatic experience in your past.

You lost a loved one at a young age.

And maybe in your mind, you feel as though this separates you from the rest.

This sort of makes you exceptional.

You've suffered so much, God lets you off easy.

But the fact is, nothing, not our suffering, not our achievements, not our points of view, not our best efforts, nothing can set you apart in God's sight as righteous.

That is all performance base.

If you're here thinking, you know what?

I don't even think I'm in any of those categories.

Well, do you drive a car?

You need no other proof than you're you can be simultaneously self-righteous and self-excusing at the same time than when you drive a car.

You're driving down the road and someone cuts you off in traffic and you go from kind of singing along the radio to near homicidal rage only five minutes later to do the same thing to someone else as you're trying to make your exit.

But that was justified because you didn't want to be late for work.

We seek exceptionalism, but then we can't even live up to our own standards.

I'm not gonna pick on anyone with bumper stickers here, but if I were to pick on people with bumper stickers here.

The fact is the person driving behind you is deeply interested in the fact that your child is an honor student.

I'm not gonna pick on those people though, but if I were, or the fact that you have a rescue pet.

Isn't it interesting that we we like to display for the world to see people that really don't care, probably?

I mean, you care, that's why you put it there, but the people that are behind you that actually can read it like they don't really care too much.

You know the phrase that comes to mind, the who rescued whom kind of thing?

It might be a little more telling we realize.

We are seeking rescue in our good works, we are seeking validation.

Even the car behind me, just give me a little honk in the horn, just something to tell me that I'm a good person.

But the fact is, well, there's one more I might use.

I don't want to forget this one.

Because I've thought about getting this neck tattoo.

God is my judge.

So when you think about God is my judge, what that's actually.

Brandy has not let me do that yet, but if I start wearing high collars, you know that I must have tipped over the edge.

What is that?

What does that phrase mean when someone has it on the back of their truck or a tattoo or something?

God is my judge.

In other words, you can't judge me.

God and I have something worked out.

I might be a menace to society, I might have killed people, I might be doing drugs in the streets, but God is my judge.

Don't judge me.

What that I think usually means is that there's an assumption that God's standard of righteousness is actually lower than society's.

And you and God have something worked out.

I think that reflects even the sentiment of our own hearts when we think we're actually going to stand before God's justice and actually get off easier than we would in the court of man.

The fact is, no one is gonna survive an appointment with God unless they're washed in the blood of Jesus Christ.

Because John Bunyan wrote this when he described sin.

He said, sin turns all of God's grace into wantonness.

It is the dare of his justice, the rape of his mercy, the jeer of his patience, the slight of his power, and the contempt of his love.

That's what happens when we sin in relation to God, all those things.

But you know, for any of us to feel the weight of our sins, to feel like when we snub our spouse, when we look self-righteous in someone else, when we're impatient, when we're angry, when we're lustful, when we're greedy, when we're covetous, when we're all these things.

For us to feel the weight of this offense against our holy God, God the Holy Spirit has to make us awaken to the sinfulness of our sin, has to enable us with new eyes to see that only Christ alone is sufficient to atone for our sins before God.

Now, Paul's insistence that justification must be by faith because of all these reasons and not our performance.

It begs the question: what kind of faith is the faith that justifies?

Historically, this is called saving faith.

Saving faith, it's differentiated from uh just wishful thinking, it's differentiated from just um believing something's gonna happen that just isn't gonna happen.

I remember when I was talking to, I wasn't gonna mention this, but I remember in college I was talking to a guy who was the president of the Atheist Agnostics and Free Thinkers Club.

Basically, they were just college students that got together who didn't like God and kind of talked bad about him.

And one time I engaged him in conversation and he said, faith is just a figment of your imagination.

He said, This is literally what he said.

This has been a long time ago, so kind of dating myself.

He said, if I have faith that Britney Spears wants to go out with me on a date, is that gonna happen because I have faith?

Does faith prove it's gonna be real?

And I can't remember exactly what I told him, I'm sure it was not very good, but my response today would be the fact that real faith, saving faith, is different than worldly faith.

Faith is not merely, Christian faith is not merely us thinking something's gonna happen, hoping it happens, wishing it would happen.

Faith is a miracle in the soul.

Faith is something that God's Holy Spirit gives us.

Faith is the first breath of a decayed carcass that has been brought to life again.

And so it's a miracle that only those whom God has given it can have it.

In the words of Hebrews chapter 11, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

In other words, by the mere having this faith, this true faith in God, this saving faith, it itself is evidence that what you're believing is true.

And that's not true of any other faith in the world.

For just a few minutes, I want us to go through verses 18 to 22.

And I want us to just let Paul's, because we're gonna give a summary of this, it's a portrait of Abraham's faith and God's promise.

I want us to hear Paul's description of Abraham's faith.

And honestly, if you you read this, it's pretty impressive.

But if you dwell on what each of these things mean about faith, it is just mind-blowing.

So, what I want to do is read each verse in turn, and then sort of summarize it in different words.

And it really is staggering what this kind of saving faith is.

Verse 18.

In hope, he believed against hope that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, so shall your offspring be.

We might describe saving faith based on this verse as saving faith is an expectation of unthinkably grand future grace from God.

Think about the fact that he expected, that's what hope actually means in Scripture.

It's an expectation of something in the future being given you by God.

And what is this expectation in Abraham's case?

It is that he, this childless 75-year-old man, is not just gonna have a son, and not just gonna be the patriarch of many nations, but that through him Messiah is gonna come who's gonna bless all the nations.

Saving faith is an expectation of unthinkably grand future grace from God.

Verse 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead, since he was about a hundred years old when Isaac was born, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb.

We summarize this by saying, saving faith audaciously stands firm in the face of impossible odds.

I mean, what are the odds?

When the promise was given to Abraham, he was 75, his wife was 65.

It took 25 years for God to say, okay, it's time.

He was a hundred years old, and his wife ninety, when they conceived and had their little boy.

Saving faith audaciously stands firm in the face of impossible odds.

Verse 20.

No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God.

This is that saving faith grows over time.

It didn't weaken.

I mean, if you think, when he was 75, he believed, and then over the next 25 years, he all but stopped believing, right?

That's what I would assume.

25 years, really, God?

But it says here that his faith grew over time.

He grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God.

As he praised God for his trustworthiness, his own faith in God strengthened in God's trustworthiness.

And saving faith grows over time for us as well, by God's grace.

Verse 21, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.

Saving faith is not a wager, it's not a coin toss.

If it lands on heads, I'm going to go with God.

If it lands on tails, I'm going to go against God.

Saving faith is fully convinced that God is trustworthy and able to accomplish all that he has promised.

And so now if I put this composite definition, this, in a definition based on the faith of Abraham, in his example, we might have something like this.

Saving faith is the audacious, unwavering expectation of unthinkably glorious future grace that is convinced, against all odds, that God is trustworthy and able to do all that He has promised in and through His Son, Jesus Christ.

That's Abraham's faith in a nutshell.

This should once and for all put away the scourge of easy believism that basically makes faith either wishful thinking on one end of the spectrum or merely the exercise of our free will and propositional truth.

That's a common theology these days, that faith, well, all it is, is us believing something to be true that we heard.

We exercised our free will.

What that makes of faith is it makes it no longer a miracle, it makes it no longer the substance of things hoped for, no longer by its own presence proving that what it believes is going to come to pass.

No, fundamentally, faith is a miracle, as I said before, the first breath of a decayed carcass that has been brought to life from the dead.

And so when we hear this promise of righteousness given to Abraham and given to even us who believe in that same God today, do our hearts say, Yes, I want to trust in this God.

Yes, He is my only hope.

Yes, no matter, no amount of performance on my part, no amount of times I've attended church or money I've given to the poor or time I've donated or volunteered is going to commend me before God.

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness.

If you're stirred to lay hold upon this audacious hope of grace in Christ alone, you can be assured that God has begun a work in you to bring you to glory that He is not going to abandon.

And this brings us to our gospel conviction in verses 23 through 25.

Because Jesus died in a rose, God saves those who believe.

Because Jesus died in a rose, God saves those who believe.

Here's where we're getting this, verse 23.

But the words, it was counted to him, quoting Genesis 15, 6, they were not written for his sake alone, but also for our sake.

It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead, Jesus our Lord, who is delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

As I pointed out earlier, there are five times in this passage that the word promise is mentioned, right?

That's what that's the thread that's woven through the passage, trusting the promise unto righteousness, the promise of righteousness in Christ.

But there's also four words that are mentioned.

Four times a word is mentioned, namely the word dead.

You have the Apostle Paul mentioning that Abraham believed God, the God who raises the dead.

Secondly, it says he can when he considered the deadness of his body and the barrenness of her womb, which in Greek just means dead, the deadness of her womb.

And then here in the last verse, verse 24, rather, it says that God raised from the dead, Jesus our Lord.

So here's another theme woven through in the context of promise, is also the theme of deadness.

But mentioned three times in the passage is not only promise and deadness, but the word resurrection.

The God who raises the dead.

The God who raised our Lord Jesus from the dead, Christ who was raised for our justification.

So here we have in the context of the deadness of Abraham's situation, the deadness of fallen humanity, the deadness of our own situation, you have God speaking forth the promise of resurrection.

Because the promise is going to be predicated on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If you follow this resurrection theme from the dead womb of Sarah, and you follow it 15 years later, whenever little Isaac was 15 years old, and on Mount Moriah, if you ascend that mountain, you see Abraham with that knife in his hand as he holds his son down, and he's rearing back in accordance with God's command to test his faith, to slay his only son, the son who he was supposed to be a patriarch through.

Hebrews chapter 11 tells us that he raised that knife and would have slain his son because he believed that God would raise him from the dead.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

The same God that raised Abraham's body, so he could conceive a son, raised Sarah's womb, would raise that son again and fulfill that promise Abraham believed.

That's why he raised that knife.

But then if you follow that promise of resurrection down the mountain Moriah, you follow it into the plains of Galilee, into the ministry of Jesus Christ, and you go by a house by a man named Jairus.

Jairus, his daughter, had died of a sickness, and Jesus passed by that way, and he enters into the house and he touches that young maiden and he whispers in her ear, young maiden arise, and she arose.

But then you go to Bethany over in Jesus' ministry, to the tomb of a man named Lazarus, and the stench of his four days of decay is hanging in the air.

But that deadness was nothing in the presence of the voice of the Creator who said, Lazarus, come forth.

But don't just stop there.

I want you to think, look in the mirror, and view your own soul.

View your own self in that and see the deadness and the stench of your own soul before God, the deadness into which God's promise comes to you.

And to know that by his Spirit, He has resurrected you so that you'd have faith in His Son and be counted righteous.

But don't stop there.

Look forward to the very future coming of Christ's kingdom.

When Jesus Christ comes back with all the hosts of heaven, the voice of the archangel will shout, every grave will be opened, the sea will yield up its dead, and those in Christ will rise from the dead to be changed from the image of Adam to the image of Jesus Christ.

And you may ask, how in the world can this possibly be?

On what can this resurrection power be possibly conditioned that this would all come to pass and God accomplish his purposes?

And our answer is if you were to slip into that garden outside of Jerusalem on Easter morning.

And if you wanted to sit in the shadows and watch the tomb of Jesus as that day dawns and to see that stone roll away, when God the Father, who had turned his back on his son for your sins, says to his son with that voice of life, My child, my son, arise.

Come away with me, my fair one.

It's no wonder that Jesus arose and that stone was rolled away because as Acts chapter 2 says, it was impossible that that tomb could hold him.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Because when God is in the grave, God's coming out of the grave, and he died, and he dies no more.

In the words of a songwriter, he said this love crucified arose.

The risen one in splendor, Jehovah's sole defender, has won the victory.

Love crucified arose, and the grave became a place of hope.

For the heart that sin and sorrow broke is beating once again.

What we have here in the resurrection of Jesus is not folklore, not myth, not wishful thinking.

What we have here is all the purposes and plans and promises of God from before time began to the consummation of all things, hinging and pivoting on one moment in history when God in the grave rose again.

Raised again to fulfill all of God's promises, raised again so that you and I by that same power would have the faith to believe unto salvation, raised again so that righteousness would be given to the unrighteous, life to the dead, and hope to the hopeless.

That through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.

The Apostle Paul's objective in setting forth Abraham as this example.

Even though Abram, we could go through his life and see all the ways that he failed, all the times he doubted God, all the times he did twice, he lied about his wife and said she was his sister.

There were some embarrassing moments in his life when he took his uh Hagar, his wife's servant, and he had a child by her out of wedlock.

There's some sad and low points in Abraham's life, but we see him as an example of saving faith because it wasn't based on his performance, but on the performance of his descendant.

And I challenge you this morning, if you're weak in faith, if you're finding yourself from day to day just looking for that next cheap fix just to keep you going, if you're just looking for that next fleeting thrill to carry you on, I want you to look at the little hands of that child of promise, the little fingers curled around the wrinkled hands of Abraham.

And then through that illustration, look into the heavens and see the ultimate child of promise, Jesus Christ, seated at the right hand of his Father.

And know that by faith we receive the promise of righteousness from our God, the God who raises the dead.

Let's pray.